what is most fascinating about nassim's writings is the night-follows-day certainty with which they will cause a flock of bitter nerds to crawl out of their dimly-lit offices to unwittingly mutter one item or another from the "nassim taleb is wrong because he's not one of us" list, which isn't so much to proof him wrong, as it is to quickly find one another so that they can fall into each others arms, delivering reassurances that they are not wrong in opposing him, and that their distinct lack of real-world success stems from the cruelness and wrongness of the outside world, not because their supposed superior insights are not, in fact, so.

Their all-time favorite, to be repeated with ceremonial regularity, is that his insights are 'trivial'. ignoring for a moment that these people also believe it 'trival' to bring a product to market once it has been figured out (by them) in the lab (if they even lower themselves to think in terms of 'products' for the 'populace'), treating his literary writings, which are intended for the general public, which is very much in need of trivial insights, as if they were his scientific writings, then dismissing his scientific writings based on his literary writings, is simply malicious, owed to the fact that he is the wrong kind of academic, who lifts weights and calls people 'imbecile' on twitter, hence reflects poorly on their comic book-like self image of scientists as some kind of quasi-master-race, which is above cursing, emotion and whose physicality is a mere inconvenience, getting in the way of dreaming up ever more distant alternate realities, to be sold to the public as discovery.